Consumer groups fear a trial by Telstra that will slow the speed of peer-to-peer (P2P) services could be the start of a trend that sees ISPs "interfering in people's online activities".

Last week Fairfax Media revealed that Telstra was planning to throttle, or slow, certain internet services during peak periods as part of a "trial" on its ADSL network that was, according to a source, likely to become permanent. Telstra has since published two blog posts explaining it.

Telstra CEO David Thodey Photo: Luis Enrique Ascui

One of the services Telstra labelled as being targeted by throttling was P2P, commonly used for distributing movies and music online. It named no others.

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But despite its transparent approach following the trial's revelation, its customers, competitors, consumer groups and internet activists have all been quick to criticise the company and its supposed motive for wanting to trial a slowdown of services such as P2P on its network.

Many Telstra customers have argued on forums including Whirlpool that internet access should be given to them as is and that it should not be interfered with before it arrives at its destination.

“[We have] serious concerns about where this could lead in terms of the ISPs interfering in people's online activities,” said Elise Davidson, a spokeswoman for the Australian Communications Consumer Action Network, the body that represents consumers on communications issues.

Network engineer Mark Newton.

“Telstra says they are doing this trial to improve their network management but the only specific benefit to consumers they have identified is improving the customer experience of 'real time entertainment', which presumably means they want to encourage people into their own online entertainment offerings.”

Ms Davidson said ACCAN would like to know from Telstra “precisely what type of improved experience would be generated by this type of discrimination against peer-to-peer traffic”.

She added that she also had reservations about the throttling because it appeared to differentiate types of online activity in order to make people pay more.

“We don't think that a reliable, unshaped internet service is something people should have to pay a premium for,” she said.

To slow traffic, Telstra will use what is know as deep packet inspection (DPI) technology, which identifies the types of traffic flowing through a network to “deprioritise” it accordingly.

P2P 'not time-critical': Telstra

In its latest post explaining the trial, to be conducted in Victoria, Telstra says that it is testing the slowdown on certain services such as P2P, which it believes are “not time-critical” and can therefore be throttled. It also says that it is conducting a separate trial “which will test what type of speed-based or alternatively application-based speed-tiered offers Telstra could take to market in future”.

In a nutshell, the separate trial could mean the company moves away from offering a service such as ADSL broadband with a speed download rate that is “up to” 20 megabits per second (Mbps) to having speed-tiers like those on offer with NBN plans (3Mbps/4Mbps/5Mbps etc). It could also lead to future plans crafted for those who are heavy users of applications such as P2P or social media sites like YouTube.

The post adds that research from the trials will inform future product and pricing decisions and help the telco serve its customers better. “[The trials] are intended to allow us to provide customers with the quality of service that best suits their needs for the lowest possible price.”

Congestion the real reason for throttling, say rivals

But despite this, engineers from rival telcos say the real reason the trial is being conducted is because throttling can be used as an alternative to upgrading parts of Telstra's ADSL network.

The engineers say Telstra's ADSL network has become congested from under-investment.

“I think that they've looked at how their network is being used and what is driving them to need to upgrade portions of it,” iiNet chief technology officer John Lindsay told Computerworld Australia.

“There appears to be congestion into some exchanges at present and they're thinking, 'If we go after the very small number of users who generate a large amount of traffic, we could stave off that and maybe put it off for longer until the NBN'. It means that the investment is never needed.”

“This seems a bit of a nonsensical solution – [throttling] legitimate content delivered over P2P ... in order to manage a faltering and under-provisioned network,” added iiNet chief regulatory officer Steve Dalby in an email to Fairfax.

“Perhaps Telstra shouldn't be in this market if they don't understand their customers' needs or digital distribution and can't build a 21st century network capable of delivering both.”

Telstra CEO dismisses concerns

Telstra CEO David Thodey dismissed concerns about the trial last week at the telco's financial results, saying that reporting of it had been “a little bit overhyped”.

“... We really have only just [been] looking at how we can manage the traffic on the network a bit better,” Mr Thodey said.

“There isn't anything really heinous here at all.

“We get congestion points and we want to try and look at ways to manage it.

“It's absolutely standard for most ISPs. We want to be absolutely transparent about it. There's nothing to hide. And I think most operators around the world do a degree of shaping anyway.”

Mr Thodey added that the trial was about making “sure people ... all get a good service”.

“I'm not quite sure how it got to [be] such a heinous thing. But it did,” he said.

Controversial 'piracy' comments haunt Telstra

While Telstra has denied in its blog posts that the trials were aimed at combating online piracy that may be occurring over Telstra's network using P2P, a Telstra executive's comment at a telecommunications conference in Dublin from 2011 has come back to haunt the company.

At the time, Telstra executive director Michael Lawrey made it clear that the throttle plan he had in mind was about targeting those who downloaded "illegal content", whom he blamed for congestion.

The RCR Wireless article the comments were reported in no longer appears online but Mr Lawrey's quotes remain on the technology news website iTnews, which repeated them.

RCR Wireless quoted Mr Lawrey as saying Telstra would also take action against customers believed to be abusing the carrier's fair-use policies.

He was also reported to have said that if the carrier's proposed system "cut out 80 per cent of the non-value adding traffic – good".

According to the RCR Wireless article, about 80 per cent of Telstra's data was chewed up by high-bandwidth users.

"I'd rather not have those 80 per cent as customers. I'd rather someone else had them as customers," Mr Lawrey reportedly said.

He did not say whether he was talking about fixed-line, smartphone customers or both.

How Telstra's trial is different to what exists now

A study published by US company Measurement Lab in October 2011 based on ISP user tests found that many Australian ISPs appeared to be throttling, or interfering with, P2P traffic in some way.

But the type of throttling Telstra is testing is more targeted, according to independent telecommunications analyst Paul Budde, who said that Telstra's trial signalled that the nation's largest telco was now wanting to take a more closer look at throttling technologies to target 'illegal' P2P users, who use it to download movies and music that they haven't paid for.

“What the announcement looks like is that Telstra have developed a more sophisticated way of [throttling] (I assume more targeted) based on intelligence they gather (deep packet),” he said.

“This ... starts encroaching on areas such as net neutrality and privacy.

“What stops carriers to use this to slow down traffic from competitors such as Google?

“They can do this under the banner of 'network management'. With technologies such as deep-packet inspection, they can get very detailed information about the nature of the traffic from individual users and they could misuse that information for their own purposes.”

He said the Netherlands cornered this issue by making specific legislation that secures net neutrality. “This country has also put limitations on deep-packet inspection for privacy reasons,” Budde said.

Trial similar to what electricity companies tried

Network engineer Mark Newton, formerly of Internode, told Stilgherrian of Crikey that slowing P2P was similar to an unpopular plan electricity companies were trialling during peak periods.

“Electricity companies experimented with 'demand management' (where they'd remotely disable your air conditioner for a few minutes at a time during peak demand) in the early 2000s, and it was hugely unpopular,” Mr Newton told Stilgherrian.

“'Load shedding', where they invoke deliberate blackouts on random suburbs to constrain demand on hot days, is unpopular enough to be a major political issue in some states.”

Whether Telstra can do something similarly unpopular in today's world remains to be seen.

“For consumers it's another case of the carrier not respecting the boundaries between 'theirs' and 'not theirs', taking an unwanted ownership stake in the customers' data,” Mr Newton said in an interview with Fairfax.

70 comments

Consumers rejected paying extra to make video calls over mobile - and now Skype and Apple's Facetime allow people to do it without paying Telstra anything. Ditto for those who are making video calls using Skype over fixed broadband, all those national and international calls being made and again, Telstra gets nothing. People are not only using P2P but are watching TV via Hulu, Netflix, BBC Online, or the US/Australia/UK networks TV catchup services rather than watching Foxtel or paying Telstra to download Bigpond Movies or Foxtel On Demand . Of course Telstra want to cripple competitors services so that you are forced to use Telstra's own products, or pay extra to be able to use others. P2P is the thin end of the wedge, trust me.

Commenter

Kaz

Location

Online

Date and time

February 12, 2013, 4:25PM

Yuppers. And to the line “There isn't anything really heinous here at all." - BULL$41T!!! It's just another form of censorship & financial control, not to mention anti-competitive to the nth degree.Provide a dumb pipe & leave it at that. If you can't, other like iinet will, as per my recent switch to them. So suck it Thodey! :)

Commenter

Nostromo

Date and time

February 12, 2013, 4:52PM

"People are not only using P2P but are watching TV via Hulu, Netflix, BBC Online, or the US/Australia/UK networks TV catchup services rather than watching Foxtel or paying Telstra to download Bigpond Movies or Foxtel On Demand"

Not if bittorrents are chewing up all the bandwidth they aren't.The whole point of this trial is to speed up interactive or time critical services like "TV via Hulu, Netflix, BBC Online, or the US/Australia/UK networks TV catchup services" as well as things like online gaming.

Commenter

Goresh

Location

Brisbane

Date and time

February 12, 2013, 6:00PM

It would be nice if they could deliver an internet service, robust and reliable, at the speeds they advertise.I decide how the connection I pay for is used, not some maniacal telco throttling down the services I want to use. Can't Australia doing anything right in the tech field?!? It's always one excuse after another.

Commenter

MIke

Location

SYD

Date and time

February 12, 2013, 6:10PM

I agree with some of what your'e saying, however it's quite difficult to watch US/Australia/UK networks TV catchup networks. The moment you try to access TV catchups online, you're informed that the area (i.e. Australia) is not serviced. So you're mistaken there. The average user, and by average I mean the user who is not tech/gadget savvy to get around protocols, cannot access this.

Commenter

AM

Location

Sydney

Date and time

February 13, 2013, 12:15AM

The reality is that the future is a wireless one - networks with lines will be viewed in years to come as a waste of money - investment in high speed wireless should be done - more towers- more capacity and even more satellites.

Commenter

the Truth

Location

Melbourne

Date and time

February 12, 2013, 4:34PM

Wireless is a finite spectrum and you still require robust backhaul for all of your new towers, you know like optical fibre in the ground and that as they say, is The Truth!

Commenter

Mark

Location

Sydney

Date and time

February 12, 2013, 4:46PM

The other difficulty is that wireless signals are by no means infallible - it's not just local weather that can mess with signals, satellites in particular are prone to disruptions in communications by solar flares. It's worth having more than one communications system in the event that one goes down.

Commenter

Simon

Date and time

February 12, 2013, 5:03PM

in response to this laughable 'wireless is the future' myth... wireless networks, be they 3/4G mobile or satellite communications add an amount of latency to TCP traffic that is tolerable by upper layer protocols like HTTP, bittorrent or FTP. But if you use your internet connection for VoIP or gaming the additional latency added, over good old terrestrial networks, makes them unusable.

Commenter

Bemused

Location

Melbourne

Date and time

February 12, 2013, 5:09PM

As an engineer (elec/comms) - that is bullshit. Stop making up your own "physics".